A New Look, More Information on the Web, but the Same Hard-hitting Style

The Steering Column

December 2006 By CSABA CSERE

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Regular readers will notice a completely new look in this issue. Although we have always made small changes and subtle improvements to the way we present our stories, we haven't undertaken a complete redesign of Car and Driver in some 20 years.

We've always worked hard to publish the most authoritative, insightful, and hardest-hitting car reviews in the business. We've supplemented these reviews with feature stories that range from first-person drives in some of the world's fastest cars to penetrating profiles about individuals of automotive interest, wacky races across the country in diesel beaters, thoughtful analyses of important automotive political issues, and much more.

Our goal with this transformation was to make the magazine as visually interesting and engaging as the stories we publish. To this end, we've overhauled our look from top to bottom and made some adjustments to our coverage to match our new design, provide even more information than before, and take advantage of our rapidly improving Web site at CARandDRIVER.com.

We've always put a great deal of effort into our testing activities because we strongly believe it is important to have a solid and accurate objective foundation to buttress our subjective observations about a car or truck. We remain the only car magazine that regularly publishes acceleration times to well beyond 100 mph for faster cars and measures the top speed of most of the production cars that we test. Therefore, in this new version of Car and Driver, we've made our presentation of test results clearer and more prominent than before, with the figures that we've measured and recorded highlighted in yellow to distinguish them from the manufacturer-supplied boilerplate.

We will continue to cover, as we have since the early '80s, all the motor vehicles that come to market that are available to our readers. But we will focus our coverage on those machines that have strong appeal to mainstream car enthusiasts. In our pages, mid-price sporting machines will always receive more coverage than full-size pickups, even though the pickups might sell in much greater volume.

Comparison tests have been a Car and Driver staple for years, and they will continue to be as we go forward. As before, we will assemble a group of similar competing vehicles, generally selected by mission and price, and clearly define how they stack up against one another. This task has been getting more difficult as automakers have been economizing their press fleets, making it harder to secure cars with specific options and sticker prices. (Neither Ford nor Chevrolet, for example, could supply a four-door Focus or a Cobalt with a manual transmission for the economy-sedan comparison in this issue.) But we firmly believe it is more meaningful to evaluate comparably priced cars rather than select them based on similar engine configurations or comparable trim levels. If a vehicle offers more performance or features for the buck, we will always do our best to recognize that.

A major change in our new design is to group the short takes, shorter previews, and specialty files in a section called Drive Lines that will follow the main road tests and comparisons. By grouping these stories in this way, we'll have more flexibility to adjust the length of these reviews, letting us cover more machinery in less space while allocating that space to the vehicles based on their intrinsic interest rather than a fixed format.

In the process of making these changes, we've removed one component of our road test — the bar graph — which compared the road-test vehicle, in five parameters, with three competitors that we have also tested. However, this element is not gone — it has merely moved to the Internet. In exchange for asking you to go to the Web to get this information, we will provide an expanded version of the bar graph, with more data and vehicles compared for each subject of a road test. We will also include on our Web site a bar graph providing an easy comparison of each vehicle in a comparison test, which is something that we've never done before.

These bar graphs can be readily found at Car and Driver Magazine Supplements on our home page, or by going directly to CARandDRIVER.com/magsup. At that location, we will also post additional photos and information about the cars published in each issue. And we will post a copy of our track sheet for every car that we have taken to the test track for performance measurements. This sheet includes additional acceleration times that don't currently fit in our comparison-test or short-take format, as well as the raw skidpad times, braking measurements, and individual corner weights for the vehicle.

Moving forward, we will also be adding special elements to CARandDRIVER.com that will expand and enhance stories in the magazine. A perfect example is our Web coverage of the construction and development of the BMW 335d sedans that we will be racing in this year's 25 Hours of Thunderhill the first week of December. A BMW diesel once won the famous 24-hour production race at the Nürburgring, and we hope to take advantage of the diesel's excellent combination of fuel economy and speed to duplicate that victory at Thunderhill this year. Our Web site provides an ideal way to showcase the details that go into creating such a race car, and we will post weekly updates on the project up through the race, when, as we did last year, we will post some nearly live track footage straight from Thunderhill.

We hope you enjoy the new look of Car and Driver. Let us know what you think through the usual channels detailed in Backfires.